Blog Platform Review: Blogger

For many people, it’s a no-brainer; if you want to blog, you need to go to Blogger. Founded by Pyra in 1999, Blogger was one of the earliest blog platforms; a combination of ease of use, no-fees with an ad-supported business model, and word of mouth made it an automatic choice. Google bought it over in 2002, and has continued to make it accessible freely, with options to integrate Adsense in your blog.

Blogger has undergone several updates over the years; even now, there’s an update underway, currently in beta. Several changes in place, addressing old limitations such as categorization, dynamic page serving instead of static HTML; but it still remains less powerful than other platforms like Wordpress or Typepad. More on this below; but if you want to jump the gun, check out the summary on Blogger.

Nevertheless, Blogger has one POWERFUL advantage: simplicity and ease of use. For a novice, who doesn’t want to learn web programming or customization, but is just looking for an easy way to get started, Blogger is reassuring; if you’ve used web-based email and a browser, you can use Blogger. This review focuses on the centrally hosted variant, with a name like yourblog.blogspot.com – we’ll cover the self-hosted variant in a later review.

Getting started :

There’s a 3 – stage process to getting started

• You register for an account with an email id, or login with an existing Google account.
• Next, you choose the name for your blog, and the blogspot name. This is one place where you may have a delay; most good names you’d think of are likely to have been taken already.
• After selecting the name, you select the template you’d like to use for your blog; Blogger offers 12 upfront, plus lets you know that you can customize it or use any other if you want to, later.

That’s it. You’re now ready to start posting if you wish to; you’ll have your blog up and running in minutes.

Customization :

You have options for changing your template, setting commenting options, choosing between full and partial feeds, and adding Adsense – these come through the menus available.

There are several places where you can find templates for a Blogger blog; some of these provide greater customization and functionality, but at a cost; you need to get into the HTML markup. Check out Blogger Templates, or Free Templates - both are hosted on Blogspot, and can give you an idea of the capabilities you can add through customization.

In the earlier version of blogger, anything else needed you to get into the template had to be hard coded; the new beta adds Page Elements such as link lists (or Blogrolls, as it’s commonly referred to), labels (or categories) and feeds. Support for third-party Page Elements is also offered.

The beta version also offers two other upgrades to address enthusiasts:

Dynamic page serving, where the content is pulled from a database and integrated with the template on the fly, rather than the old static html publishing that the regular version provides. However, this is available only on blogspot; not supported on self-hosted domains.

Support for RSS 2.0 is also added, but the default feeds are still Atom based.

Where Blogger lags behind :

Several areas related to social networking are still primitive in Blogger; while it won’t deter a novice, it does show up as a significant lack to a more advanced blogger.

Commenting is one such area; the default settings are for registered blogger users, all others show up as “Anonymous”. Comment moderation and spam comment control is again an “all or nothing” approach; while there is a captcha option, you still have to manually moderate all comments, or let everything through.

Social bookmarking and pinging is another feature that’s practically non-existent. The new beta’s just added “category” functionality; tagging technorati style, or one-click add to the bookmarking engines like del.icio.us or dig isn’t there. While you could add it manually, the fatigue factor involved means that very few Blogger users would use it in any meaningful way. Trackbacks are also rudimentary.

Blogger by default allows only one ping – to weblogs.us. Technorati seems to have worked its own way of tracking blogspot blogs, but given the rich ping functionality available through other platforms, this sticks out like a sore thumb.

Other features :

Blogger includes support for blogging through email, or from a mobile phone; photos and videos are also supported, either from external links or uploaded.

Multi-Author blogs are also supported – the owner of the blog can add other Blogger users as authors.

Multiple blogs are allowed – any registered user can add as many blogs as he or she chooses to.

Conclusion :

Blogger serves well as a beginner platform; ease of use is the key. Certainly, anyone with minimal internet skills can be up and blogging in less than half an hour or so; the test blog at Profyposts on Blogspot was set up in about 10 minutes.

And for a novice user, the lack of functionality doesn’t become a pain point; rather, the simplicity it enables means that they don’t have to go through a long learning process before they can get started. Some third party solutions like Blogrolling help to mitigate the lack of functionality built in; you can find work-arounds that provide some relief.

Blogger’s weaknesses show up when your need is really around

• Robust commenting and user interaction
• Need to integrate your blog with other site functionality, such as forums or CMS software
• Monetising your blog – enabling ecommerce, or other such.

All these are requirements which a serious blogger or webmaster would have; if the need is only for a casual, personal blog which you share with friends, Blogger’s a good choice.